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The mechanics of lightness

The wide-ranging career of the Italian virtuoso

"The array of buildings by Renzo Piano is staggering in scope and comprehensive in the diversity of scale, material, and form. He is truly an architect whose sensibilities represent the widest range of this and earlier centuries." Such was the description of Renzo Piano given by the Pritzker Prize jury citation as they bestowed the prestigious award on him in 1998. Whereas some architects have a signature style, what sets Piano apart is that he seeks simply to apply a coherent set of ideas to new projects in extraordinarily different ways. "One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again," Piano says. "Like a movie director doing a love story, a Western, or a murder mystery, a new world confronts an architect with each project." This explains why it takes more than a superficial glance to recognize Piano’s fingerprints on such varied projects as the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kansai Airport in Osaka, Japan, the Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, The New York Times Building in New York, and his most recent structure, the London Bridge Tower, which will be upon completion the tallest building in Western Europe.

About the Series:Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Architecture Series features:

an introduction to the life and work of the architect

the major works in chronological order

information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions

a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings

The author:Philip Jodidio(born 1954) studied art history and economics at Harvard, and edited Connaissance des Arts for over 20 years. His books include TASCHEN’s Architecture Now! series, and monographs on Tadao Ando, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, and Zaha Hadid. He is internationally renowned as one of the most popular writers on the subject of architecture.

Piano

"I was a little skeptical about these handbag-sized books about so-called starchitects, Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano. What, no more dumbed-down, glossy coffee table versions of much more complex stories? And while, the some extent, this may be true and the content is certainly compact, these books are surprisingly enlightening, mainly due to author Philip Jodidio’s architectural knowledge, superb photography of the key projects and crucially, the revealing personal interviews with the architects. I actually like the fact that the books are transportable; I’ve been carrying mine around with me, picking them up and down at will, being ‘wowed’ by the plethora of exciting projects and the architects imaginations."— Architecture NZ, Auckland, New Zealand